A significant amount of carbon has been stored in Arctic permafrost for tens of thousands of years. And unless we take radical steps to restore the ecosystem that we destroyed there, the permafrost will melt and release 1400 GT of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. This dwarfs the amount humans generate annually and would accelerate climate change on an exponential scale. So, what can we do to reestablish the grasslands and reintroduce the animals that used to dominate the region?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, here with Christophe Jospe. We woke up extra early this morning because we are talking to fellows both in our country but also in faraway Russia, and it was the only way to make the time zones work. We haven’t done remote episodes yet because we prefer to be in person, but we thought it would be extremely unlikely, nay impossible, to actually get our guests in the same room at the same time, despite the fact that their story is perhaps best told together.
I don’t even know where to start with this, Christophe. We’ve been hearing about Pleistocene Park for a long time. One of our advisors is obsessed with it, or has been talking about it for a very long time. We read about it more in the book Drawdown. I read Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creature, by Ben Mezrich. And so we have with us today Nikita Zimov and George Church. Christophe, I will leave it to you to introduce them more, pinching myself because we’re delighted to have both of them on here.
Christophe Jospe: I guess we’ll start with introducing them, Ross. That’s usually how we do these podcasts, right?
Ross Kenyon: I believe so, yeah. Yes, that is it. That is an appropriate way to begin.
Christophe Jospe: Well, so we’ll start with George. He’s an American geneticist, molecular engineer and chemist, and he is currently at the Harvard Medical School. He’s really known for a lot of his work in gene sequencing, genome sequencing. And then we’ll pass it over to Nikita Zimov, who is the director of Pleistocene Park — not to be confused with Jurassic Park, but maybe there’s some similarities, I think, in the naming convention there. I think that was unintentional, but we’ll find out.
Ross Kenyon: It’s quite possible. But George, good morning — I think it’s still morning over there in Boston. If you’d like to start out with, well, your career is quite long and illustrious, so we don’t need to go through all of the points on your résumé. But really, if you could connect the dots for us a little bit as to what led you to where you are here today, on this podcast talking with Nikita.
George Church: Yeah. Well, like many young people, I was fascinated with megafauna when I was young, especially mammoths, and I was inspired by the World’s Fair in ’64. And then soon after, we invented next-generation sequencing around 2003. It was applied to ancient DNA, which we were having trouble sequencing up to that point. Now there are many ancient species that were done, and people asked — journalists asked — whether we could synthesize as well as sequence. Could we test the ideas coming out of the sequence? And with a little reflection I thought that might not only be theoretically possible, but could be quite interesting.
And then I started reading about which species would be best, and it just kept coming back to mammoth as being the most interesting, especially as I read more and more from the Zimov team about the possible ecological implications for a herbivore that could knock down trees and enhance the grass. So it just became quite compelling, and ever since we’ve been working on better ways of doing genome editing in cells, and doing with elephants what we’ve essentially done with pigs, which is doing multiple edits to enhance their ability to cope or deal with certain new functional needs.
Christophe Jospe: So for the layman out there, what does genome sequencing even mean, and what has happened that has made it possible to do some of the things that you’re working on today?
George Church: Being able to read and write DNA has evolved extremely rapidly. Our lab has contributed to many of the methods for both reading and writing DNA, or genomes, such that they’re about 10 million times less expensive now, for a variety of applications, ancient DNA just being one of them. And what reading means is that you take — usually if you have pure DNA, although it can be broken up; typically ancient DNA is broken up — and you can read it, the A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s, into the computer. Most mammals, like humans, and mammals have two copies of three billion base pairs of DNA in each of their cells.
And so we want to read that accurately into the computer, and then we take it from the computer and write it back out without the breaks. So it’s broken when we find it, but then we want to rewrite it in an unbroken way. And one way of doing that is literally chemically synthesizing it. The other way is editing a closely related species, sort of iteratively editing it to the point that it has changed into a hybrid of an ancient and the modern species.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you for that. And Nikita, how about for you? What was your path to get to where you are today?
Nikita Zimov: Hey. Well, my story wasn’t that long and sophisticated. Well, I grew up in a family where creating Pleistocene Park was a thing and was the main activity. So the park was founded back in the ’90s, and the idea came to my dad, to my father’s head, back in the ’80s. And so his name is Sergey Zimov, and he is the one who started this experiment and the whole idea of restoration of grassland ecosystems in the Arctic. And so I basically grew up in that, got my education, came back to the family business.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s [unclear]. I think you might be the only person on Earth where that’s the family business. Very unique. What is the vision for Pleistocene Park? What do you imagine happening? Why do you think it’s important and worth continuing the family trade?
Nikita Zimov: So, very briefly: just 15,000 years ago the entire Arctic looked totally different than it looks now. So there were millions of herbivores roaming in this landscape, and it was mostly grass that dominated the landscape, and pretty much, I think, the closest analogue would be the Serengeti. So most of the planet was covered by this ecosystem, including the Arctic. And then when the Ice Age ended, because humans came to the land and destroyed this ecosystem, they dropped the number of animals substantially, driving some animals extinct.
And unfortunately, in the Arctic, grasses cannot compete against other vegetation like mosses, shrubs and trees without help of animals. So animals actually allow grasses to grow: they trample down their enemies and allow grasses to dominate. Without animals, very quickly after the number of animals went down, grasses were replaced by the mosses, shrubs and trees, which are a very low-productive ecosystem, or vegetation. And modern ecosystems in the Arctic — it’s considered a wilderness. However, this is actually all invasive plants out there, and they currently do not give any benefits, neither to humans nor to animals. So you can drive through entire Siberia and not see even a single big animal.
And our idea is to reverse the whole system back. So we want to bring animals which either lived in this place or can live there now, or maybe, with the help of George, we can eventually get animals which used to live there but are now absent on the planet, and adapted to new places, and allow them to promote grass growth. So [unclear] — horses trample down there, moose strip the bark of the trees, mammoths actually knock down trees. And we in the park see that the grasses are starting to grow better, and eventually we want to create an ecosystem which will be self-sustainable, full of herbivores, full of predators, which will be able to exist on their own.
First of all, it will dramatically increase the richness of the ecosystems, of the modern nature. And also, most importantly, these ecosystems allow us to mitigate climate change, at least to some extent. So these grasslands in the Arctic will be more beneficial in terms of cooling compared with the [unclear] ecosystems we have there now.
Ross Kenyon: I think when people think about reversing climate change — hey, that’s the name of the show, do the Ron Howard — why would they prefer grassland to trees? I think people normally think that trees have a lot more potential than grassland. Granted, this view would be in error, but why would grasslands in the Arctic be so valuable?
Nikita Zimov: So there are [unclear]. The most common logic is actually coming mostly from the tropical forests, which is definitely, what I think, is true — the statement for the tropical forest. It’s already less true or debatable in the temperate climate, and the Arctic is just not working this way. So just to give you some brief numbers: on each square meter of territory in the Arctic, on average, above-ground vegetation is only 2 kilograms per square meter. So vegetation there is anyway very sparse and very poor, and you cannot store much of the carbon. So basically you cannot absorb much CO2 from the atmosphere, so it will not reduce CO2 concentration by much, because the surface and the [unclear] vegetation cannot store much.
However, the story with the Arctic is a totally different story. Decomposition in the soils is very low, and potentially you could have up to 100 kilograms of carbon on only one square meter underneath, under the ground, in the top meter. So just 50 times different. In the tropics, vice versa, you can have huge trees which will store lots of carbon in it. However, soil decomposition is very high and you cannot store as much carbon as you would in the above-ground vegetation. So even in the tropics, people say that we need to protect rainforest — I will say nothing against this; having rainforest in the tropics will allow to have more carbon in the system.
In the Arctic it’s the other way around: their grasses form very deep root systems and pump the CO2 from the atmosphere down to the very cold environment, where it’s protected from decomposition and protected from fires. So that’s a continuous sink of carbon. Additionally, if you look at the forest and if you look at the grassland, you’ll see that grasses are slightly lighter than forest. So it’s called albedo effect. So the whiter the surface, the more energy — some of it is reflected back to space without converting it into the warming temperature.
And especially in the Arctic the difference is — well, in the summer it’s, you know, it’s shades of green, it’s not that pronounced. But in the spring, April, right now — so right now in Chersky, where I just came from two days ago, there is an enormous amount of sun, and all the grasslands in the park are still covered with snow. So they are entirely white and then reflecting all the solar energy back to space. And all the shrublands and larch trees, they don’t have any leaves or needles, and they have their dark stems which absorb an enormous amount of sun heat, and the snow is melting around trees just faster. So it’s quite a substantial effect.
And third, quite important, and I think most beloved by media, is the idea that just in our little state of Yakutia — so just one state of Russia — there is more carbon stored in the permafrost in the form of tiny roots, [unclear] maybe 30,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago. So by mass, these roots are more than the biomass of all above-ground vegetation of the planet. So it’s a huge source of carbon which has been stored there for tens of thousands of years and been intact.
But now with climate change, the temperature of air is rising, and so does the temperature of permafrost. And already last year there was — there were three very warm and snowy years, and at some point permafrost really started to degrade in our region. And when and if that happens on a large scale, it will be one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. And this will be a very substantial [unclear]. It will very substantially accelerate climate change in the wrong direction.
Christophe Jospe: So I’m really glad that you actually brought up permafrost, because that is a big concern. I mean, I see videos at times where it’s a man standing over a lake and they just light a candle or a match and literally it catches on fire, because you have this very intense gas just coming bubbling out of the lakes. And a big part of that, as you say, is the decomposition. And so just to get this straight: what we’re talking about is large mammals moving over the grasslands, eating the grasslands, which is on the permafrost itself, and actually contributing to restoring the carbon into the soils in a way that counteracts some of this effect. Is that correct?
Nikita Zimov: No, there is two. So if you do look at our ground, so the top meter is something that thaws every year, so that’s where the roots are growing, and basically below the meter is the soil which never thawed, at least in the last, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of years, and out there this carbon is stored. And first of all, we can get more into the top meter by this ecosystem — so the thing I [unclear] originally. And secondly, all this — this 40-meter-thick soil, which stores [unclear], almost, somewhere over a tonne of carbon on each square meter. So the concentration of carbon there is higher than anywhere else on the planet.
And with the climate change it’s getting melted and these lakes are forming and the methane is produced. So when permafrost degrades, microbes quickly convert these roots into greenhouse gases, methane and CO2. And if there is a way to prevent permafrost from degrading, that’s a very good and urgent thing to do.
Ross Kenyon: Got it. And right before we started this podcast, you started describing the — let’s just, for lack of a better word, call it logistical challenges — of getting different megafauna up to this region. So why do we need megafauna up in this area? And I guess, just anecdotally, how is it going? What’s it like with the different bison and different animals?
Nikita Zimov: Well, so first of all, the way that animals allow grasses to grow — so basically any animal needs grass to have enough food, but in Arctic, grass needs animals to compete with other vegetation. So that’s the main thing, it’s a zero — chicken and egg problem. So what we are trying to do, we are artificially maintaining those animals in the park, allow them to have this grazing effect. Secondly, the thing I didn’t explain before, but to protect permafrost we need to trample down the snow in the winter, which would allow to substantially cool the permafrost during the wintertime and drop the overall temperature.
And any animals which came, the grazing animals, they go and graze all year round and they trample down the snow. That allows a potential cooling of permafrost. So that’s why we need big herbivores — the higher the variety, the more effective the ecosystem. So the more animals which we can bring, the better. And yes, the challenges of transporting animals is actually quite big. So tomorrow I fly to the western part of Russia, and in a week from that time we’ll get a [unclear] that drives to Denmark, where we will load two bison on a truck and then head out all the way to the Pleistocene Park. It should probably take us more than a month, and it’s about 10,000 miles by trucks and boats and barges. So that’s going to be [unclear] — that’s an adventure.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve also seen updates online of — this isn’t the first time you’ve tried to get megafauna to the far reaches of Siberia. It seems like a regular adventure of yours.
Nikita Zimov: Unfortunately, yes, it is a regular adventure. You know what happened? When you don’t have enough resources or finances to do it the proper way, you are forced to do it adventurous ways. So I have lots and lots of adventures in my life.
Ross Kenyon: Why don’t you just get — George, why don’t you just cook them up some woolly mammoth? What’s the holdup over there?
George Church: Well, I think we need both. We need a diverse ecosystem. And obviously what we’re doing has not been done before, so we don’t know exactly how long it takes. But the holdup is really — the editing is going quite well. The technology just gets better and better every year. We’re probably aiming for somewhere between 40 and 50 edits for now, and we’ve done that number, more than that number of edits already in pigs that are live pigs, by nuclear transfer, and also in human cells. So I think the editing is going okay. And then we have to do either nuclear transfer into African elephant eggs, or grow the embryos in the laboratory, one or the other. That will be probably the most challenging step.
Ross Kenyon: So just to really punctuate how much of a breakthrough this is: what you’re talking about is growing a species which has become extinct, which is the woolly mammoth — but it’s not exactly a woolly mammoth — in an elephant, and it somehow needs to handle the warm weather, because I imagine elephants don’t like Siberia, but the version of woolly mammoth that you’re producing does. Is it even a woolly mammoth? Is it an oliphant? Is it a Heffalump? Like, what are we talking about here?
George Church: So most of the elephants, both ancient and modern, share a lot of DNA. They’re essentially hybrids. They’re capable of hybridizing even though they’re called separate species — they’re probably capable of hybridizing. So this will be a hybrid that hopefully will have some of the advantages of each, including some new advantages, like we’re trying to make them resistant to the herpes viruses, which is probably the main risk of extinction right now — somewhere between 20 and 80 percent of newborns are dying from herpes virus. So we’d like to make them cold resistant, and we are de-extincting — we were restoring the genes that were extinct.
So the versions of the genes that were extinct — and we’ve already restored a few and tested them for their properties. We, being the whole community, have tested them, and the properties look like they’re consistent with cold resistance. So one can bring back the incredible diversity, both in time and space. We have almost no limit to where we can get new and/or diverse old features and put them into a hybrid that will be compatible with probably both warm and cold temperatures. And the mammals had to survive over a pretty broad range, and elephants can tolerate modest periods of time at freezing temperatures, but not long winters at minus 40, which is what the mammoth can handle.
Ross Kenyon: Is this the first time that this level of de-extincting has happened? And what are the ethics questions that surround this? I’m sure people are both excited, but I could also see them being concerned, even though the potential here for reversing climate change seems quite huge, and also for the extinct species that, in our lack of foresight, we have not adequately protected to date.
George Church: I think most of the concerns are, you know, things that we also were concerned about and addressed very early on. Things like: are we ignoring modern species? The answer is no. We’re focusing on the Asian elephant, which is going extinct if we don’t provide it with some of the features that we’re talking about here, like herpes virus resistance and cold resistance, to give them a new home that’s far away from human interference. So that’s one — you know, what are we doing about modern species. A second one is: will it be lonely, or in a zoo? No, it’s going to be in Pleistocene Park and beyond, so hopefully whole herds of them, if the first ones look healthy and happy.
You know, there are concerns of: can we reverse it? I think any new technology, you should have a reversal plan in place before you even start. These are not tiny bacteria, viruses or insects; these are gigantic herbivores, and it’s been demonstrated that you can reverse herbivore introduction. Some invasive species are very difficult to get rid of, like zebra mussels or, you know, water hyacinths, but giant herbivores have been removed from, say, the Galápagos, where you had too many goats. And the other few concerns, I think they’re all addressed or addressable.
Ross Kenyon: Is this — just to clarify — is this the first time we have de-extincted a species, or will have de-extincted a species, in this manner?
George Church: Well, we’re not — we’re just de-extincting genes, and it’s the first time that an organism that depends on the functioning of the extinct genes will exist. So there, a couple of viruses have been resuscitated, notably the 1918 flu virus; I was not involved in that. What we have now are elephant cells that contain functioning versions of mammoth genes. That already exists, and that’s the first, as far as we know.
Ross Kenyon: So what do we call these creatures?
George Church: Well, I would call them, you know, Asian elephants adapted for new environments. Or you could call them cold-resistant elephants. Or you could call them elemoths, if you really want to make a new word. Elemoths.
Christophe Jospe: Trademark that, sell merchandise, George.
George Church: Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Okay, so first of all, we’re big fans and we love the concept. I imagine that this could turn into one of the world’s longest science experiments, because you introduce the first version of elemoths and you hope that they procreate up north and continue to spread and track, and you can sort of study a whole lot of things. I’d see you, George, as someone who probably plays five-dimensional chess and can think through a lot of the different layers of—
Ross Kenyon: That phrase is just forever tainted now.
Christophe Jospe: So — but, you… okay, fine. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it would be tainted anyway. But to go back to my question, George: how do you see this evolving over the next few decades, if really things were to go as successfully as possible? And then, to take it another question: where could all this go wrong?
George Church: Well, I think the main way it can go wrong is if the permafrost melts and all the carbon dioxide and methane goes up in the air, which is 1400 gigatonnes, which would completely dwarf the nine gigatonnes per year that we worry about with all human consumption put together. So that would be the worst-case scenario. Probably the second worst-case scenario is that they don’t breed well, which would then lead to the worst case [unclear], possibly, if there’s not some other intervention. We’re hoping to not depend on slow breeding. There are various ways that we could get them to go more quickly in parallel, but that’s very speculative and it’s too early to say whether that’s going to work.
But the best-case scenario is that we can parallelize the production and training of baby elephants, so there’s tens of thousands of them more or less simultaneously. The gestation period is 22 months, so that’s not that long in the scope of things, you know. Our experience has been that many things that look like they’re going to take six decades, like the lowering of the cost of genome sequencing, took more like 6 to 10 years. So I’m not predicting, and just keeping an open mind how quick these things can move.
Ross Kenyon: Are you interested as well, George, in reintroducing some hybrid version of the aurochs, or the passenger pigeon, or some other extinct species? Is there a lot of opportunity for this moving forward?
George Church: I think — you know, I’m a little more focused on conservation, as is the group that I’m working with, Revive & Restore. It creates living species; there’s some things that might be done to enhance their ability to return to the wild. They’re not extinct — to enhance stability of the wild, to support them, or them to support the wild. A little bit more interested in endangered species than extinct ones. But there’s a lot we can do using the diversity of extinct adjacent and [unclear] cousins that are extinct. The DNA from those cousins can be used to enhance modern species. I think that’s a lot of the emphasis.
But you know, if a species goes extinct we don’t just suddenly stop working on it, and some of the ones you mentioned are quite interesting to other people in the project. I’m entirely focused on elephants and mammoth DNA, but there are hundreds of other projects at Revive & Restore that are also noteworthy.
Ross Kenyon: And you’re quite lucky that you’ve chosen a very cold climate, because you’re able to find mammoths that are frozen that actually still have DNA that hasn’t degraded so much that you couldn’t actually use it. Where some of these other animals I named — I’m not sure, it sounds like it’d be very hard to find a passenger pigeon or thereabouts up in the tundra or taiga or in the northern latitudes. So it seems like all of the momentum is pulling very strongly for mammoths at this time.
George Church: Well, no, our reasons for doing the mammoth are more related to Nikita’s reasons and Sergey Zimov’s reasons. It doesn’t have to do with the DNA. The DNA for many non-frozen species is available, including passenger pigeon. There’s really high-quality DNA available from a whole variety of extinct species that have never been frozen. That’s one of the beauties of DNA sequencing, is that DNA lasts for quite a long time. So yes, there’s a good DNA sequence from passenger pigeons and many other extinct species.
Ross Kenyon: So, Nikita, you were talking about your adventures — I’d love to hear a few of them if you have some short stories. But really, we’re looking at a park which is just a drop in the bucket in terms of scale, in terms of geography, and the total size of the tundra. We want to basically refreeze and restore carbon to a vast amount of land, and it also somehow needs to get paid for, and I’d imagine that funding is a key challenge in getting this off the ground. But very simply, how do you scale?
Nikita Zimov: Well, the question is what [unclear] me from scaling up. So the benefit of, you know, doing that in such a remote place as Siberia, Russia, is that most of the Siberian Russia is unpopulated and there’s very few industry and there is no farming. And what we do in the Pleistocene Park — so I have 2,000 hectares; first, I own about 50,000 hectares. And if I would want to extend it even 10 times or much more than that, even without any governmental support or financial support, I will be able to do that, because I will not be stepping on anybody’s blisters. So no one has any financial interest there, and that’s why it’s possible to do.
So it’s pretty much the win-win situation. With the natives, they don’t really get much profits from [unclear], and so they are not holding this [unclear] as much as they do in other places of the world. So scaling up, it’s pretty much, it’s easy. So if you have enough animals and you have already established sustainable ecosystem where you have enough nutrients, where you have enough seed pool for grasses to grow quickly, then the ecosystem can expand by itself.
So of course, if we want to do it in a reasonable time, we would need to start several other parks — and I have [unclear] of the planet, of Siberia, maybe Alaska, maybe in Canada — and then this park will eventually grow up to the scale enough to have meaningful impact on the climate. And I think that financially, that’s when people will think that it’s an important thing to do, I think, and when the government people say it’s critical, I think the money for this project will be able to be found quickly, both in Russia and outside of Russia. So it’s not that expensive to allow animals to breed freely.
Ross Kenyon: Do you find that you have much support from the Russian government? Are they excited about what you’re doing? I know there’s a lot to look forward to. I think Russia may be one of the potential winners in a climate-changed world, with the opening of the Arctic and mineral rights and all the things that come along with it. But I imagine they might be hedging their bets both ways. If they can be prevented, then things like Pleistocene Park seem like something that can earn Russia a fair amount of money, and that would be great. And if not, they’re also preparing for a climate-changed world and adapting. And that way too — is that a fair summation of how you think your region is thinking about this?
Nikita Zimov: So, let’s see, just maybe 10 years ago no one was — we were just a couple crazy Russians doing this thing, and the broad support worldwide and understanding of our knowledge, what we do, was rather low. I think in the last few years there is a breakthrough, and it’s just — outside of Russia, definitely. So in the US, in Europe, people [unclear] the results of media about what we do. But also in Russia, I think in the last two, three years there has been a very substantial shift from pretty much not knowing what we’re doing or not caring, into kind of big interest, well, growing interest.
So there hasn’t been anything stated from a politics point of view, but you know, the country originally gave us that land and made it tax-free, so it wasn’t that Russia was in any way against this idea. And now when we, you know, speak publicly how much benefits this could bring to our country recently — and I think kind of the acknowledgement is growing. And you know, it’s just, when you’re talking to a government, it’s not that quick. You know, in some places, some countries, [unclear] believe in the climate change. Don’t be frustrated: Russia is accepting — actually started to accept the idea that climate change is real just a few years ago, but it’s [unclear] scientific problem. So the big difference is that in the US all scientists say that climate change is real and politicians say it’s not, and finally in Russia it’s the other way around.
Ross Kenyon: So yeah, so overall — I’m going to avoid the Yakov Smirnoff Russian reversal here. I like the way that you described it, Nikita. I think there’s probably a good deal of ecotourism as well, because we’re talking about a park that maybe people, you know, in the same way that they go on a safari — maybe you have humans who want to come up and watch. I’m dying to go, I wish we could. It’s hard to get there.
Nikita Zimov: Yeah. Book your ticket.
Christophe Jospe: But with the introduction of large megafauna, or anything that dramatically alters an ecosystem, even with the best intentions, that can sometimes come with unforeseen consequences. And so how do you think about some of these risks?
Nikita Zimov: Well, if you use the same term, the worst-case scenario — I would clearly, well, I’m sure that the worst-case scenario will be if we do nothing. That’s definitely — we know how the world is, which direction we are moving now. If we do nothing, we are doomed. From practical point of view, from us — we are introducing the [unclear] to the land where they originally lived, and we are promoting the vegetation which originally was there before the first human impact. What we say, that this wild nature, as you see — well, you see it as the wild nature, but in reality it’s invasive species out there, and it’s been [unclear] ecosystems out there in existence which give no profits.
So I don’t really see any hidden stones. I’m sure that it’s possible to create sustainable ecosystem out there. The question is how quickly we can do that. Will we have enough time to have meaningful impact on the climate before the climate changes there? I don’t know, it’s debatable. But I know that if we will not do anything, we will definitely get in trouble.
Christophe Jospe: So let’s say — I’m [unclear] — and what I think the Pleistocene Park embodies is that we live in the Anthropocene. In a way, humans are to some extent responsible for managing nature and must figure out how to do it in the most effective or efficient way. And it brings to mind the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone Park as an example, and actually how that dramatically improved the ecosystem and the carbon sequestration potential. And so what I was trying to get at with my questions is how to mitigate the potential risks in some capacity. But I am 100% on board that doing nothing is the worst-case scenario.
It’s almost — I would push back to those who say large-scale carbon removal is a moral hazard. I would argue it’s a moral hazard not to start pursuing large-scale carbon removal. But it’s more around the how, to mitigate the risks. Let’s just assume you have all the money you need, you have all the megafauna you want, George has technologies, it works, he’s sending you all the — what is it? The elemoths. [unclear]. The elemoths are coming up there, you have them. And then how do you mitigate the potential risks of the project in one way or another?
Nikita Zimov: But how did you define the risks? Risks — quote, there is that they will all die out, or what’s the risk?
Ross Kenyon: I think, Christophe, correct me if I’m wrong, your concern is that somehow we’re not able to recreate these grassland environments, and instead introduce complexity in a way that maybe backfires or makes things worse. Like, what if they knock down the trees and [unclear] to some amount, and also did not create grasslands, something like that.
Christophe Jospe: Sure, as an example.
Nikita Zimov: Well, no, you know, we’ve been running the park for 20 years already, and I clearly state to you that the grass is — what I learned in the last few years, that we do need some nutrients, that we need some grass seeds. But if we have that, and we have animals, the grasses are going very well. Also, you know, when you’re talking about permafrost degradation — permafrost which, we say, 40 meters — well, permafrost is now, in our region, 600 meters thick. So down to 600 meters, all frozen. But what we care about is this top 40 meters.
But even those 40 meters — for all these 40 meters to thaw, it will take more than a century [unclear], and then probably a couple, two, three centuries for this carbon to be, at least half of that to be emitted to the atmosphere. And that’s a long process and potentially it can be slowed down and stalled. However, permafrost is not only a huge storage of carbon, but in reality it’s also a huge storage of nitrogen. So it’s very fertile soil, so there’s lots of nutrients in the permafrost.
And in case if we will have permafrost degradation, eventually — you do actually — it will be bad for the climate, but in terms of establishing high-productive ecosystems it will be super, I would honestly say. Because when permafrost degrades, all modern ecosystems are getting destroyed automatically. You don’t need to have mammoths to knock down the trees; basically climate change — all the modern trees, the majority of the modern trees which are growing out there in the region, will fall down because the ground will collapse.
So it’s not, you know, when people say, oh, you’re kind of — what do you say — you’re knocking down trees. Well, first of all, I don’t [unclear] the trees, but the reality is that all the trees are doomed. So climate change will not be mild on the [unclear] trees, because the ground will collapse and fertile soils will appear and immediately the grasses will start to grow. And the reason is that by the time these grasses will start to develop, we do need to have lots of animals, so they will be able to come and expand to this [unclear] and occupy this new grass, but then we will be able to stabilize.
So it’s a kind of complex problem. And the climate — actually climate change is a serious issue, because sometimes you can have rain events in the winter and ice is forming on the snow and animals cannot trample. Ecosystem should be big, so animals migrate from less favorable conditions to the more favorable conditions. But at the same time climate change can also be beneficial in some cases for this ecosystem.
Ross Kenyon: What’s next for the both of you? I saw the film rights for Woolly, by Ben Mezrich — the book about your story, at least so far — had been bought and are in development. Is there a movie coming? What else is happening which we look forward to in the next little bit of time from you both?
George Church: Well, yes, 20th Century Fox has purchased the rights and is moving forward, as far as I know. It’s important to be able to communicate with a broad set of individuals so that we can at a minimum raise consciousness about the possibility of reversal and the importance of the Arctic in particular. So we need more things like that. Just writing a science paper doesn’t have quite the impact on the public as a well-told story, especially one that’s, in this case, nonfiction but also non-documentary. So it’s kind of the ideal format for getting across this very dramatic challenge and opportunity. What else — there’s a bunch of experiments both on the ground with Nikita and in our lab, trying to do with elephants what we’ve done with pigs.
Ross Kenyon: Great, and that’s very exciting. And Nikita, what should we look for from you in the near future? Well, besides your sort of Smokey and the Bandit running cross country with your megafauna in the back — the image of which is amazing.
Nikita Zimov: Yeah, that’s pretty well put. Some more or less simple: so we are introducing some of the new animals, our goal is to allow them to adapt to new places, extend our park territory, increase the number of herbivores. Definitely, then we will need to introduce predators, and I think once we have predators we’ll have more or less sustainable ecosystem, which we would want to expand further. And of course, that sounds easy, but the reality is always much more complicated and takes more time than expected.
And of course, yes, we are very much dependent on the financial situation, because so far the majority of our activity has always been funded from the money we make running the Arctic research station in Siberia. And you could guess that fundamental research in Siberia is not the most profitable business of all.
Ross Kenyon: God bless you, Nikita, for trying. It sounds like you’re one of those people doing something that sounds a little wild at first, but it’s one of those ideas that could be hugely impactful, and one of those great moonshots. And also, I love ideas like this that have that germ of strong creativity built right into it. I think when people think about climate change, their imagination is oftentimes quite constrained and they’re thinking about planting more trees, when really we have to think a lot bigger — in some ways, if for no other reason than to get people more excited and thinking creatively about it. Of course, trees are part of the solution as well. Look, did you want to say something, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: No, not really. I was just going to wrap it up. It’s rare that we get two such esteemed guests on the podcast who both know each other. And so I was wondering, either for George or Nikita, if there were things that you wanted to ask each other while you are here on the air with us. A fun one.
George Church: Yeah, well, we don’t [unclear]. We just spent quite a bit of time together in August, so it is possible to get us in the same room. Also we sometimes meet — Nikita came to my lab here in Boston, so we’ve each visited each other’s laboratories, and I was certainly not at all disappointed, I was quite impressed. Even though I had read many things from their papers on ecosystem, being there is very moving emotionally and gives you a great confidence that we can and should go forward. So I guess I don’t expect a major update since August. These are — this is hard work, there’s no doubt about that.
Nikita Zimov: Yeah. You know, maybe — it will just social networks and some media, they often demand some, you know, quote news, and everybody wants to hear good news. But you know, both we do different science, but actually both of these, it’s a fundamental science, and you know, usually it’s a very slow process and there is not that much news coming along. And in terms of what would I want to wish or discuss with George — not much really.
But you know, I understand that some tasks — if you’re taking a task which no one has ever done before and no one can give you a book how to do it exactly, it’s always going with complications and some failures. And when there are failures, people are — you know, it’s often, especially if there is, you know, social pressure on you at the same time, it’s always maybe might be a challenge to find motivation to continue doing what you’re doing if it doesn’t really work from the first time. And so what would I wish him, and myself as well? [unclear] courage and interest to achieve what we are proposing.
Ross Kenyon: If our listeners wanted to keep up with what the both of you are doing, or support your work in some way, what’s the best way for them to do so?
George Church: So there are two beautiful websites. One is Nikita’s and the other is the Revive & Restore, which is a broad set of species, and Nikita’s is specifically on Pleistocene Park and their research station.
Nikita Zimov: Yeah. So we have our website, we have more or less active Facebook page for the Pleistocene Park, and if you would want to support our work, we do have US registered non-profit, which is 501(c)(3). It’s called Pleistocene Park Foundation, and it also has its own website, so you can go there and support us through this foundation.
Ross Kenyon: Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for joining us. We wanted to do this for a long time and I’m happy that we finally just said we’re just going to call these folks up, get them on remotely if we have to. So thanks so much for doing this, thanks for enduring the technological challenges of podcasting remotely, which hasn’t caught up nearly as much as I might have hoped. And thanks for teaching us, and thanks for inspiring people with what you do.
George Church: Yeah, thank you very much.
Nikita Zimov: Thanks. Yeah, thank you all. Pleasure, thank you.
Ross Kenyon: And if you like the show, please rate and review us in iTunes, subscribe, tell your friends. It helps a lot and helps us keep doing what we’re doing. So thank you so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change.
